International Drug Control
Consensus Fractured

The first integrated analysis of the causes and effects of diverging views of drug use within the international community.

David R. Bewley-Taylor (Author)

9781107014978, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 March 2012

360 pages, 1 b/w illus. 2 maps 4 tables
23.4 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.68 kg

'At a time when an increasing number of governments and analysts are questioning the design of the international drug control system, David R. Bewley-Taylor has written a perceptive and elegant account of the frailties of the system. His account of the essentially farcical, decade-long effort to meet the goals of a 1998 United Nations General Assembly resolution to rid the world of cocaine and heroin is analytical, edifying and entertaining.' Peter Reuter, University of Maryland, and co-author of Drug War Heresies and of The World Heroin Market

There remains substantial agreement among the international community on many aspects of the contemporary UN drug control regime. However, diverging views on the non-medical and non-scientific use of a range of controlled substances make drug policy an increasingly contested and transitionary field of multinational cooperation. Employing a fine-grained and interdisciplinary approach, this book provides the first integrated analysis of the sources, manifestations and sometimes paradoxical implications of this divergence. The author develops an original explanatory framework through which to understand better the dynamic and tense intersection between policy shifts at varying levels of governance and the regime's core prohibitive norm. Highlighting the centrality of the harm reduction approach and tolerant cannabis policies to an ongoing process of regime transformation, this book examines the efforts of those actors seeking to defend the existing international control framework and explores rationales and scenarios which may lead to the international community moving beyond it.

1. Introduction
2. Soft defection and the domestic normalization of harm reduction
3. Harm reduction at the UN: member state tension and systemic dissonance
4. Cannabis, soft defection and regime weakening
5. Defending the regime: the International Narcotics Control Board
6. Beyond regime weakening? Lessons from the UNGASS decade.

Subject Areas: International organisations & institutions [LBBU], United Nations & UN agencies [JPSN1], International relations [JPS], Crime & criminology [JKV]